Monday, May 15, 2017

What Do I Know About Reviews? Dresden Files Accelerated (Fate)

I’ve mentioned before on the blog that I have a weakness for
monster hunting urban fantasy stories. My favorite Powered by the Apocalypse
game is Monster of the Week. My wife
and I watch Supernatural and Grimm together all the time. I even
watched the short lived live action Dresden
Files television series. For what it’s worth, the series may have left much
to be desired, but I kind of liked Paul Blackthorne as Dresden.

I wasn’t an early adopter of the Dresden Files. Eventually several of my friends raved about it
enough that I picked up the books, and I was hooked. And now I’m in withdrawal.
But that’s a whole other topic.

When I found out there was a Dresden Files RPG, I picked the books up almost as soon as I
realized they existed. I enjoyed in “in-universe” descriptions of the case
files and how to model those events in game terms. That said, I had a hard time
figuring out how the game rules came together until I picked up Fate Core. The text was enjoyable, but
there seemed to be enough gaps between mechanical discussions that I would lose
the thread of how things worked together.

Even once I figured out how the rules interacted with one
another some things nagged at me. The biggest issue is that magic, while it
seemed to be as it was presented in the fiction, was more fiddly than standard Fate rules. Additionally, as presented,
a lot of the character types required a higher-powered game just to fit in all
the stunts needed to properly emulate the fiction.

It seemed like it would be a fun game, but it also felt as
if Fate Core (which was developed
after the Dresden Files RPG)
presented better options for modeling some of the aspects of the setting. I got
Fate Core as part of the Fate Core Kickstarter, and one of the
stretch goals was Dresden Accelerated,
a version of the Dresden Files RPG
that would be modeled using the Fate
Accelerated rules set.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting these rules for a while, and now
I’ve finally read them cover to cover and here are my thoughts.

What Did the
Archive Put Together?

Dresden Accelerated
looks much more like the Fate Worlds of
Adventure books than the previous Dresden
Files RPG books. There is a very clean, consistent format to how the book
looks. Where it departs from standard Fate
formatting is the series of post-it notes in the margins, continuing the
tradition of characters from the setting commenting on their world while
presenting game rules.

The artwork is more “comic book” this time around than some
of the art in the previous Dresden Files
RPG books, but I think this works very well to convey the feel of the
setting. I also believe much of this artwork was produced in conjunction with
the Dresden Files Card Game produced
by Evil Hat. Overall, it’s a clean, very attractive package, but if you want it
to match the appearance created by the rest of the Dresden RPG line, it’s not quite going to match up. The PDF (which
is all I have available at the time of this post), is 256 pages, including an
index and an example character sheet at the end.

Invoice and The Powers that
Be

The introductory material and first chapter introduce us to
the convention used for this book, and that convention is that this is an “in-world”
artifact, where the Archive (if you aren’t familiar with the books, she’s kind
of an oracle in the setting) is presenting the book as a primer to the
supernatural realms for a client, and providing simulation rules for running
scenarios so that he can train his agents. The sidebars of the book appear to
be post-it notes that form a running conversation between her and her bodyguard
about events that happened in the setting.

The first section introduces various power groups in the
setting, as well as sample NPCs that represent these various factions. In the introduction, it notes that this is a complete
rule-set. You don’t need to own Fate Core
or Fate Accelerated to make use of
them. This isn’t intended to be a supplement to either of them. That brings us
to a potential issue, depending on how you digest your game information. All
the NPCs have stats provided, and we don’t get anywhere near explaining those
stats yet.

If you have read Fate
Core, Accelerated, and the Fate
Toolkit, you can start to piece together what those stats mean, but this is
a distinct set of rules, so knowing anything about those books isn’t assumed.

Regardless, the banter between Ivy and Kincaid is great, and
the information on the setting is solid, and a good summary for GMs getting
ready to run the game. The game stats, however, are going to be a distraction
if you are reading the book linearly. Due to the running dialogue between Ivy
and Kincaid, you probably will be doing this, because the discussion leads you
in that direction.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go

This section deals with the overall cosmology of the
setting, explaining how magic flows on the mortal realm, the Nevernever, and
the Outer Gates. It is worth noting that, since this “in world” document is
assumed to have been written after the most recent book in the series, the
picture of how the cosmology fits together is a bit clearer than in the earlier
Dresden Files RPG books.

Velvet Glove, Iron Fist

This section is a fairly detailed look at assumed behavior in
the setting. It ranges from what the White Council expects from wizards, to
what the Unseelie Accords expect from signatories, and then offers some
discussion about what happens when people don’t follow those rules.

Of note, the Laws of Magic are presented much more as a set
of laws enforced by the White Council than cosmic rules that just exist,
compared to the previous Dresden Files
RPG material. While the previous books were presented as Harry’s geeky
friends trying to make an RPG, Ivy is presenting a much more concise
explanation of the Dresden-verse as a game setting. This section uses Ivy’s
perspective to solid effect.

In the previous material, Billy and Harry are piecing things
together. In this, Ivy is stating what is known as fact, and speculates from
time to time, but the information, both as in-world “fact” and running a game, is
much more “solid” this time around.

Ironically, it’s more “solid” because, in places, it’s less
specific. In the previous material, Harry’s voice is used to state things, from
his point of view, that seem to be fact, but later turn out to be more
malleable. In this case, Ivy is much more prone to clearly delineate what is “known”
and what is speculation.

In the Beginning

This chapter is about early campaign creation. Instead of
the very intensive city creation rules in the original Dresden Files RPG, there
is a much more simplified, but still collaborative, process.

As an aside, I like the city creation rules in the Dresden
Files RPG, but I can say that, having presented those rules to some gamer
friends that were not deeply invested in Fate to begin with, they seemed like
more cognitive work than they were ready to undertake.

In this “accelerated” version, you are picking what factions
you want to play a part in the story, what factions you don’t want to include
in the campaign, determining what the PCs know about the goals and actions of
the power groups, and determining a starting event based on those goals. It’s much more focused and “jump into the action” than city
creation, and it also encourages the GM to add secret goals that the PCs may
not know about to the factions in play.

The Heaven of Invention

Now that you have your factions and a general campaign theme
going, this chapter deals with creating characters. While the game is called “accelerated,”
and it uses approaches and a simplified single stress track, it’s fair to say
that this is a bit more complicated than the base Fate Accelerated rules are.

Characters pick a mantle, which gives them a few special
conditions they can check off that is unique to that mantle (or unique to a few
similarly themed mantles, at least). Conditions are specialized forms of Consequences
that are predetermined.

There is way too much for me to go into here, but
essentially, some of your conditions are meant to fuel the abilities you get
from your mantle, and reinforce the ways that you would be limited, and how you
would recover.

Mantles are the bundles of abilities that were present in
the Dresden Files RPG to represent
various character types. Instead of listing the various packages of stunts for
different assumed levels of campaigns, so that you might build an apprentice or
a full blown White Council wizard, you would take the appropriate mantle, and
then your extra stunts and the bonus provided by your approaches will show how
skilled you might be at a given thing.

Mantles also play with the scale rules from the Fate Toolkit. Essentially, if you are a
mortal, you aren’t operating at scale. If you are a Wizard, you are likely
operating at Supernatural scale when you use your magic, so you either get +2
on your action against someone that is below your scale, or +4 shifts if you
didn’t take the +2 before resolving your action.

There is no assumption of balance between mantles. If you
want a Fey Knight and a Clued In Mortal in the same group, there will be times
where the Fey Knight is going to have scale on their rolls and the mortal won’t.
However, there are some stunts that various mortals can pick up where they know
tricks to erase “scale” from opponents working against them.

It’s much cleaner than the Dresden RPG version, with lots and lots of stunts making up an
established character concept, and the specialized conditions do a lot to
reinforce the “rules” of how the supernatural works in the setting, as well as
general themes of the books, such as the Indebted condition. Even if a
character has scale when using their abilities, they don’t always apply. For
example, a wizard only gets to function with Supernatural scale when they are
using their magic, so there is a fictional limiter. That said, there are times
when some character types are going to be rolling with scale while the less
powerful characters don’t get that benefit, so it is something you need to
address when creating a party (which, to be fair, the rules mention as well).

The Play’s The Thing

If you are familiar with Fate, this is the chapter where the
book explains the Four Actions in the game, as well as how to determine
approaches and what approach might apply. I think approaches are explained
better here than I have seen them in some other Fate products where they are
utilized.

Aspects, the Fulcrums of Fate

This section gets into the types of aspects used in the
game, how to use fate points, and applying rules like invoking and compelling
aspects, as well as declaring details.

With Great Power

This section of the book provides the specific, pre-built
mantles and stunts in the game, and gives some of the specifics of what the
various mantle specific conditions mean, and how to recover from them.

The mantles are grouped under Pure Mortals, Spellcasters,
Scions and Emissaries, True Fae, and Vampires. Unlike the Dresden Files RPG, you can play full “monsters” under these rules.
Some of the mantles, specifically the ones under Scions and Emissaries, allow
you to have some of the elements of the Pure Mortal mantles as well.

In some cases, if a stunt calls for you to be able to check
off a specific condition, if you have a mantle that allows for that condition,
you can probably take that stunt, allowing you to build “hybrid” characters,
like, I don’t know, a wizard that is also a fey knight.

Additionally, there is some extrapolation of the setting in
this chapter, as emissaries of certain fey creatures are introduced that (to my
knowledge) haven’t appeared in the books, but make logical sense for the
setting. This gives you some room to play with similar themes as “canon”
characters, without ignoring the roles that those characters have.

So Mote It Be

Holy carp, do I like this chapter. Compared to the very
detailed Thaumaturgy rules in the Dresden
Files RPG, performing ritual magic is super easy—from a game resolution
standpoint, that is. Essentially, you come up with what you want to do, and if
you can, emulate it with abilities from stunts or mantles, if it’s something
that is going to affect a character for a while.

You make a check based on how well you prepare the ritual,
and if you are successful, you get to narrate the costs of the ritual. If you
fail, the GM tells you all the costs for the ritual. If you tie, you take turns
coming up with costs you need to pay for the ritual. Once you pay all the
costs, the ritual, as you specified it at the first step, goes off.

The chapter also mentions that some ritual spells are going
to be much simpler and don’t need as much effort to detail them. Tracking
spells fall into this category. In this case, the fun of the conflict comes
from succeeding and knowing you have everything you will likely need for the
spell, to the tension of having to track down that item you need to pay the
cost quickly, so you can track the person as fast as possible.

Mortals with no magical aptitude can’t perform rituals—unless
they take the indebted condition to some kind of supernatural entity, and checking
off indebted may also be a means of paying the costs of various rituals. This is
a great, setting-reinforcing mechanic to introduce.

Wrath, Ruin, and the Red Dawn

This section goes into running the game in specific scenes,
such as contests and exchanges. Most of this will be pretty familiar to gamers
that have a working understanding of Fate,
but one interesting difference in Dresden
Accelerated is using the same style initiative that was popularized by Marvel Heroic back in the day.

If you aren’t familiar with this, the first person to go is
the person initiating the conflict, and they hand off to another character,
until everyone has gone once in the scene, and the last person to go in the
first exchange hands off to the first person to go in the second exchange. The
only difference from Marvel Heroic being
that all the GM characters go on the GM’s turn (meaning it’s going to hurt even
worse if a player hands off to the GM at the end of the exchange, and they hand
off to themselves at the beginning of the next exchange).

This section also returns to conditions, and how to recover
them. Of special note is that, while it is possible to concede just as in other
Fate settings, depending on the conditions you have checked, what it means to
be taken out can vary. For example, if you take the Doomed condition and get
taken out—well, it is called the Doomed condition.

Because the source material is about a wizard private
investigator, there is a special section on running investigations. These work,
at least a little bit, like the ritual magic, in that your success and failure
on checks may result in paying costs, although the “cost” may be that the group
gets waylaid by thugs before they find the trail of clues. The emphasis is that
the investigation doesn’t fail, it just takes longer and gets more complicated
with failed checks.

The Journey of a Thousand Miles

This section deals with character advancement, when you can
change your aspects, add points to your approaches, get more stunts, or even
change mantles, depending on the development of the story arcs.

A Kind and Patient Master

This section is on running the game, from the GM’s
perspective. It gives advice on campaign structure, deciding on what costs are
in rituals and investigations, how much detail to put into NPCs characters and
what stats they need, and includes some sample monsters.

For simpler NPCs, you are essentially just assigning a
positive rating for things that the NPC is good at. For monsters, there isn’t a
lot of structure, so much as deciding if they are immune to harm from certain
things and what their abilities might be.

The number of sample monsters don’t comprise a significant
bestiary. They are there to show a GM how to build their own monsters, but the
amount of detail needed to run a monster is relatively minimal. Example
monsters include hellhounds, ghouls, and a Faust (a mortal that has become
corrupted because they sold their soul to a supernatural entity).

You also have Sue, but she's kind of unique.

We’ll Always Have Parish

This section includes a sample campaign structure, complete
with pre-generated PCs, in case you want to have a group give the game a test
drive before they dig into creating their own characters.

The sample campaign is set around New Orleans, and provides
some factions operating in the area, some sample NPCs, and presents their
opening moves, just as detailed in the campaign creation rules in earlier
chapters.

In this case, you have werewolves and fomor encroaching on a
power vacuum created by the disappearance of Wardens of the White Council, with
the stakes being the stability of supernatural politics in the United States’
southern region.

Like Baltimore and Las Vegas in other Dresden Files RPG material, it provides an area that is detailed
enough with Dresden-verse elements to make it feel appropriate, but remains far
enough removed from Chicago to keep characters from tripping over canon, if
they don’t want to do so.

It’s worth noting, as well, that the sample pre-generated
player characters are also interesting enough to be good contact NPCs if the
players do make their own characters. Even if they don’t base themselves out of
New Orleans, they have built in contacts if the GM or the PCs decide to go on a
road trip to Louisiana. Character concepts include a half-naga changeling, a
retired Knight of the Cross, and a White Court Vampire that feeds off fear and
works in a hospital.

Index and Play Aids

In addition to the index, there is a nice two-page summary
of rules that not only covers the base actions of Fate, but also gives a step
by step summary of things like recovering conditions or performing ritual
magic, as well as ranking the different scales that exist in the game.

Places of Power

The banter between Ivy and Kincaid is entertaining throughout.
The setting is presented as a game world perhaps a bit more clearly than in any
product for the line so far. Mantles enable “mixed parties” that resemble the
inspirational material much more closely. Magic and mantles are much more
clearly presented than before, and retain enough special rules to make them
feel specific to the setting, but also have the increased flexibility that
feels much more native to Fate games.

Bad Pacts

While entertaining, the order of presentation (setting
first, rules second) might be confusing for some readers, and unlike game rules
that don’t have an ongoing “narrative,” there is a suggested “right order” to
read the chapters. Playing a group with mixed scale mantles is certainly
possible, but if the GM isn’t careful about the challenges, some players with
mantles that aren’t of a higher scale may feel outclassed.

Soulfire

I had to think a bit to include any downsides to this book. They
exist, but they tend to be minimal or situational.

Before I go much further, I think I also need to point out
that all the comparisons with the Dresden
Files RPG aren’t meant to beat up on those rules. They were created before
there was a Fate Core, to be a
specific RPG for the Dresden Files,
and they were made with assumptions based on the earlier books in the series.
They are a solid, fun set of rules, that I, personally, felt were a little too
complicated in some areas.

Dresden Accelerated
just feels like it sings on every level where it engages. It presents the
setting in enough detail to make it gameable, without bogging down with too
much setting detail for a core rulebook. It gives great, setting specific
examples of rules first introduced in the Fate
Toolkit. In some cases, it does a better job of explaining the Fate rules than other Fate products have done, possibly owing
to the ability to give setting specific examples of their application.

The book is going to appeal to multiple people. It’s a great
“in-world” artifact for fans of the books. It is a solid set of rules for
displaying optional rules in Fate. If
you are a fan of the Dresden Files
specifically, it’s a great set of rules, but even more broadly, if you are a
fan of Urban Fantasy or Monster Hunting genres, there is a ton of material to
use from this book.

2 comments:

I too felt that the order in which the book was written was a bit confusing. No having run anything FATE related I still have problems understanding some things and I have a feeling if I were to try to run it for my current group it just would not fly.